


shape the world to your will

by underoriginal



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 00:38:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5519081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underoriginal/pseuds/underoriginal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There is an ocean in her mind. </i>
</p><p>Rey, through the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shape the world to your will

i. 

They leave her behind and she sobs and screams and cries all that day and night but the next morning she picks herself up and keeps going. She’s just a little girl, too small to stand on her own, surrounded by strangers, but she knows her family will come back to her so she waits and counts the days. 

She doesn’t know how old she is, she’s forgotten how many days she saw before Jakku, but she can count the hours since she last saw her family. They will be able to tell her when her birthday is. In the meantime, she is the line of scratches on the wall of her shelter. She grows and there are more and more scratches but she never gives up hope.

ii.

Her hair is long and unruly, hanging in her face and sticking to her back. She ties it back sometimes with strips of cloth, but it always falls loose and free. She wants to chop it off, but if she does, they won’t recognize her. They left behind a girl with long hair. They will be looking for a girl with long hair. She wears her hair long and loose and climbs through wreckages, small and slim, fitting into spaces where no one else can and she doesn’t mind when her hair gets caught on things.

But as she gets older she can feel her body beginning to change and she prays they will still be able to recognize her. She sees her face in cracked and dirtied glass and teaches herself to tie her hair back the way she used to remember, three weights hanging from her head. She uses three strips of cloth and some would call it a waste but now her hair doesn’t get caught as she crawls towards her next meal and now they’ll be able to recognize her again.

iii. 

Not everyone in Jakku likes having scavengers around. She doesn’t understand why. All she takes is what no one else wants, sells meager parts for half portions and eats and drinks from old canisters left abandoned in the sands. But Jakku wants her gone so she learns how to get away.

No one wants the old speeder, so she learns how to clean it up and pilot it and travel further than she ever did before. No one wants the flying junk heap, so she learns who stole it from who and who stole it before them and what they did to it and how she can unmake it. Sometimes she dreams of the stars, but she still has to wait. She learns how to fly and makes long lists in her head of things she will do when her family comes back to her. 

She hopes they recognize her. She doesn’t remember them.

She learns to fly and flies deep into the desert where no one minds her and she flies back every day to wait and hope and fix and mend. Everything that she breaks she has to fix herself. She can fix anything, even the garbage that no one else wants, that floats down into the lands she has taken to calling hers.

iv.

Sometimes, visitors come to Jakku. They’re never the ones that she wants, but they wear fine clothes and bring fine stories. She learns to charm them, bright smile, quick fingers, cheerful laugh, lean on a stick tell a joke ask a favor make a friend. Take what you need. She trades food for stories of the wastes, tall tales she spins in the dead of night to keep herself from going mad in the silence with nothing but droids to talk to.

She can speak any language she wants, with enough time to practice, and she talks to everyone who comes through. Sometimes, they tell her stories instead. Once, and old man gestures to the massive wreckage out in the desert.

 _Do you know what those are?_ he asks and he tells her that they are Star Destroyers, great ships strong enough to break planets to pieces, remnants of a war that nearly tore the galaxy to pieces.

She has her own name for them. She calls them shade.

v.

She finds a staff one day covered in wires and frayed to bits. Once, it would have crackled and sang and dealt death. Now she keeps it around to knock people around if they try to knock her around.

She isn’t very popular, one lonely scavenger coming in to trade whatever scraps she can find. Usually, people don’t bother her, but sometimes she finds something worth five or ten portions. Then people want to talk to her and beat her and take from her.

So she keeps the staff around and she learns to swing it. It’s a long process, trial and error, and she comes home most days bruised and tired but her arms get stronger and she gets more confident and more powerful and before long she’s giving bruises, not getting them.

When they come for her, they come two at a time and she laughs because what she carries isn’t even worth two portions so even if she loses, so do they. She doesn’t lose though. Not anymore.

vi.

Not many people come to Jakku, especially not with big galactic events happening. She hears whispers sometimes, the New Order, the Resistance, Luke Skywalker. She hears a lot of whispers in the wind and sand. She learns to ignore it. But she can’t ignore it when a droid rolls up to her.

She tells herself that she doesn’t want the droid around, that she’s content being alone until her family comes back, but she remembers the ships she learned to fly and she dreams of the stars now more than her parents and new ships more than the one that they left on. She’s stopped wondering if they just forgot her, as quiet and unremarkable as she is, or if they were waiting for something else.

The next thing she knows, there are TIE fighters and resistance troops and explosions and a ship of legends (the first junker she learned to fly) and before she can stop it, she’s wrapped up in something bigger than all of her dreams and all she wants to do is go home and wait.

She doesn’t want to accept what she has known for years. With this much green in the galaxy, there isn’t any space to love a little dust girl. There is a destiny coming for her and she rejects it. She carved out a world on Jakku. She isn’t ready for a galaxy yet.

vii.

There is an ocean in her mind. An ocean with an island in the middle of it and an old man on the island. The First Order’s leader is trying to force his way into her mind, trying to pull out her memories. She has memories to give him, shifting sands and scratches in metal and long tangled hair, speeders and staffs and starships buried in the sand. She has a planet and a lifetime of memories with no room for a map in them.

She has a world and a life and for the first time since she watched that ship fly away, she looks down and realizes that she has stood on her own two feet for her whole life.

The lightsaber in her hand shrieks memories to her, gentle and harsh, beautiful and terrible, but in the middle of the swirling storm is _Rey_ and she is tired of waiting.


End file.
